Mitt Romney gets personal in New Hampshire
HUDSON, N.H. — It’s rare that a presidential candidate discusses, in some detail, utilizing a bucket to use the bathroom. They often don’t often talk about showering with a hose, or the time they made an off-the-cuff marriage proposal to their girlfriend.
Tonight, Mitt Romney did all three.
During the town hall meeting here this evening, one voter – declaring himself “an absolutely, unashamed Mitt-head’’ — asked Romney to recount a meaningful experience in his life.
The former Massachusetts governor, on a day when he was criticized for offering a $10,000 bet with Texas Governor Rick Perry to settle a dispute, used the question to launch into a tale about his time as a Mormon missionary in France.
“You see these Mormon missionaries that drive around on bicycles with the little tags on their shirt,’’ Romney said. “And, you know, I grew up in a home with a great deal of affluence, my parents had done very well. My dad had grown up poor and he wanted us to work very hard, but as an American I had everything I needed. And I was asked to go off by my church to go off and live in France.’’
While conceding that France was not “a third-world country,’’ Romney said, his mission required him to live under what today would be no more than a $600 monthly stipend.
He lived modestly, he said. Food was purchased for each meal because the apartments he lived in while there usually had no refrigerators. Showers and bathtubs were rare.
“You know, you’re not living high on the hog at that kind of level,’’ he said. “So I lived with people in France who lived very modestly. A number of the apartments I lived in while I was there didn’t have toilets. We had instead little pads on the ground, you know how that works. There was a chain behind you with a bucket, it was a bucket affair. I had not experienced one of those in the United States.’’
“Most of the apartments I lived in had no shower, or bathtub. In some cases, there were buildings that had showers. You go in, you pay a couple of Francs and you could get a shower,’’ he added. “We’d do that once a week. Or if we were lucky, we actually bought a hose and we stuck it on the sink and we’d hold it there with the hose and the big bucket underneath us in the kitchen and wash ourselves that way.’’
“I said to myself, ‘Wow. I sure am lucky to have been born in the United States of America,’’’ Romney said. “I began to appreciate the freedoms and the gifts that come by virtue of having been in this country.’’
When Romney returned from France, he said, his family was there to greet him. Also there was the girlfriend he hadn’t seen in more than two years, Ann.
“We sat in the very back row of the car,’’ Romney said. “On the ride back, I turned to her and said, ‘You know, I just feel the same about you as I did 2 ½ years ago when I left.’ She said, ‘I feel the same about you.’ I said, ‘Do you want to get married?’ She said, ‘Yeah.’ So when we got home we told our parents we were going to get married in a couple weeks. They weren’t wild about that idea — they held it off for three months. But we did get married.’’
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